Bernadette Casey
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Facts about the Cuckoo
Facts about the Cuckoo By all reasonable bets, the baby should have put in an appearance on Sunday 16th June. The girl was already overdue by nearly a week and while knitting a pair of green and white bootees, she set her kitchen alight. It wasn’t exactly her fault (so she told herself afterwards), although it was her job to cook Sunday dinner. Her father had bought them an electric cooker, but it was from bankrupt stock, part of a dumped load of American ovens used previously by the U.S. army in wartime (surely not the second world war? the oven looked like a 50s design. Korea? Maybe, but how did it end up in Swansea?) Anyway, her dad had bought it for £2 and it looked good: clean, with a lot of impressive knobs and a grill, but with only three oven settings, high, low and in between; worse still, it lacked a thermostat. That meant that on the occasions when they could afford to buy a couple of lamb chops or some sausages, she needed to be in the kitchen watching the food cook, and turning the oven off and on, off and on, in order to stop it getting too hot. On that sunny summer’s day, she neglected to stay put. Instead, with an aching back and the need to put her feet up, she sat too long in her living room, concentrating on making her baby’s tiny boots. She hadn’t had a lot of knitting experience but was determined to get it right. Just because she was a pregnant teenager didn’t mean she was a hopeless case and she wanted to prove that. But when she went to check on the lamb chops and saw the smoke, she felt as useless as you could ever feel – and frightened too.
By Bernadette Casey5 years ago in Families
